Writing a ttRPG - Wyverns & Warrens (Pt 10 - Enough to Start Writing) (Patreon)

(This article is not part of the content of this blog's that is covered by the OGL 1.0a.)

I'm designing Wyverns & Warrens (WyvWar), an effort at a short, easy-to-learn, easy-to-play, fast-playing fantasy ttRPG that still has a depth of options. And I am doing that in weekly installments, exclusively for my paying Patrons!

You can check out the earlier articles at the links below.

First Look - Wyverns & Warrens Fantasy ttRPGPreview 01 - When Are Hit Points Not Hit Points?Preview 02 - Paths & EdgesPt. 1 Writing and RPG (How We Got Here)Pt 2. First Outline DraftPt. 3 - Core Mechanic, Attacks, and DamagePt. 4 - Target NumbersPt. 5 - Damage and BenchmarksPt. 6 - Time, Space, Scale, Distance, Movement, and RangePt. 7 - What Defines A Character, First Draft: AttributesPt. 8 - Hero McHeroFacePt. 9 - A Framework for Magic

I've made design plans for all the rules I foresee needing at this point. I haven't written all of any of them, but I do have what I consider "enough to start writing" a first draft as alluded to in last week's post. I say 'a first draft' because, despite all the design work that has gone into the WyvWar ttRPG so far, not one word of what's written in these articles to date is going to end up in the rulebook. At least, not in the form they are currently written. (And even when I have a first draft, it may not have a lot of the actual final verbiage of the finished rulebook.)

(We're approaching the moment when we begin writing the real meat of the game... but right now it still looms ahead of us. Art © Dean Spencer, used under license.)

That doesn't worry me at all. At early stages of building a ttRPG from scratch, I want to explore my options, iterate on good ideas, and not worry yet about the exact way to express the final concepts so they are clear and intuitive. But before I start writing a first draft of a hopefully playtestable game, I need to re-orient my mind from specifically rules, to an entire game. I want to make sure I've considered the three legs I see as the core components of a game -- the rules, the audience, and the story. (There are other crucial components to a game, like form factor, accessibility, art, and marketing, which I should keep an eye on now but really become key when I'm looking at actually publishing, rather than making drafts.) Everything I have done so far speaks primarily to the rules, and I want to give the other legs some thought before I go forward with a full draft of the rules.

Of course, this step would be different if I had started with the audience or the story, but I am normally a rules-first game creator. That is far from the only way to go about writing a ttRPG. It's just as reasonable to have some narrative or story point or feel you want, and to start with that. Or to have an image in your head, and to start with that. In fact, nearly any inspiration that moves the creator is a reasonable place to start. Want to build a playlist or theme board first? Great! Have an idea for a mathematical formula that would fix a major annoyance you have with your favorite existing game? You go do that math, my friend.

It's also important to note that while I intend to do all the writerly parts of this game by myself, some people find they are only good at creating certain parts of ttRPGs (or only willing to create certain parts, which is a good thing to know about yourself even if you are capable of doing it all). There's an extra step for those creators, which is knowing when to seek to collaborate or hire others to do the parts they aren't going to. My important advice there is pretty reductive--don't do it too early... or too late. (Yeah, I know. Real helpful.)

If you are going to make a game truly collaborative, you may want to find the right collaborators very early, and talk through what the game is going to be like, and who is going to do what. You are ALSO going to want contracts that spell out who has final say, who owns what, how people are going to get compensated, how ownership of the final game works, and so on. I have been asked by people involved in such projects to help them iron things like that out after the fact when they did not have contracts up front, and it's a mess. And 9 times out of 10 there's no maliciousness involved--the various creators just all walked in with different expectations of how the details would work, and it was never discussed (or at least never definitively decided).

If you are going to retain control (and potentially ownership) of the project, you may want to be further along on the part you are doing yourself before bringing other people on board. And here's a place where mood boards and playlists can really be helpful in conveying a tone or sub-genre. If I am brought on to help with a "fantasy sailing ttRPG," my perception of it is very different if the creator's touchstone example is "Master and Commander: Far Side of the World but with enough magic to emulate 1920s-level technology" vs. "Sinbad meets Pirates of the Caribbean," vs. "The Battlestar Galactica reboot but in the high seas with sorcerers instead of Cylons."

And again... contracts. If any among of money, work, or ownership is exchanging hands, PLEASE have at least a simple contract that lays out all the crucial terms. Even if everyone is very clear on it verbally, memories drift, circumstances can change, and so on.

And when looking for collaborators and/or hired help, check that the people you work with are good at the parts you are assigning to them. There are magnificent, amazing adventure writers who have gotten plentiful freelance work for years, who just aren't good at game mechanics. Their creativity and descriptive skills make it worthwhile for the developers hiring them to fix numerous rules errors. Those would likely be great picks for worldbuilding and character descriptions and timelines, but terrible for writing the core rules of a new game.

In the past, I have been one of those specialists who should only be hired for specific parts of a game.

When I was laid off from Wizards of the Coast in 2001, just as the d20 System boom hit, I got a ton of work because I had proven experience working with those game rules in 3 different settings (Star Wars, Wheel of Time, and core D&D). I wasn't hired to write big chunks of the EverQuest ttRPG because of my EQ expertise (I'd never played it before when I was hired, though I fixed that), but because I could look at core d20 System rules and understand how to modify them to give a different feel, or to expand options, or to emulate specific fictional powers or events, without breaking everything.

But, at the time. I would have been a terrible choice to write ALL of EQ tabletop, in part exactly because I wasn't intimately familiar with it. But I also just wasn't as skilled with worldbuilding, adventure writing, and narrative elements. As the d20 Boom continued and I was doing full-time freelance work, I got hired for a lot of projects as a d20 System Engineer, working with others to make sure the rules matched the game's tone (or as closely as possible -- there were absolutely some d20 System-compatible games put out that would have been better in a different game system). That taught me a lot about good and bad collaboration habits.

It ALSO taught me a lot about worldbuilding, adventure writing, and narrative elements. Thankfully, I've grown and learned over 25 years of writing since, and am much better at the non-pure-rules sections of a game than I used to be.

I wanted to touch on these topics because for a lot of creators, they are going to be a big part of how to get a ttRPG written. But since I am NOT collaborating on WyvWar, I can skip straight to looking at the intended audience and story. And since my intended audience it dedicated RPG players...

Next Week: What Is A Roleplaying Game?